By Sheila Marina, Planet of Peace Energy Healing
Grief is not only an emotion. It is a physical event.
It lives in the chest as a weight that no amount of deep breathing can dislodge. It lives in the throat as a tightness that makes swallowing feel like effort. It lives in the stomach as a hollowness that food cannot fill. It lives in the limbs as a heaviness that makes the simplest movements feel like wading through water.
You have been told that grief takes time. That it moves through stages. That it will soften, eventually, if you allow it to follow its natural course.
All of this is true. And none of it addresses the question the body is asking: where is this weight supposed to go?
She was 41 when she lost her 10-year-old daughter in a sudden accident. One moment her child was alive and present in the world. The next moment she was gone — and the five days that followed, before her daughter’s body was recovered, were a devastation beyond what language can hold.
Three years had passed when she came to me. She had tried to recover. She had a seven-year-old daughter — who had been present on the day of the accident — to care for. She had recently returned to work. She was, by every external measure, doing the things a person does when they are moving through grief.
Her body told a different story.
She was a woman of slight build. And yet she reported that her body always felt much larger than it was — a persistent, physical sensation of swelling and expansion that contradicted everything the mirror showed her. She felt bloated. She had difficulty breathing most days. Swallowing required effort. And she was always checking — scanning her environment, monitoring her surviving daughter, assessing whether everything was okay with a hypervigilance that never rested.
Her body had taken on the physical weight of what it could not process emotionally. The grief had settled into her tissue, her breathing, her nervous system — expressing itself as sensation, as tightness, as a body that felt larger than it was because it was holding something enormous.
She was carrying her daughter in the only way her body knew how.
Using the Emotion Code, we began the careful, precise work of identifying what her body was holding and what it was ready to release.
After the first session, she reported something she described as radical surprise: she felt lighter. The word lighter carries particular significance for a woman whose body had felt heavy and swollen for three years. It was the first physical shift she had experienced since the loss — the first indication that the weight was not permanent.
She returned for five more sessions. The work was gradual, respectful, and led entirely by her body’s own intelligence. We moved at the pace her subconscious mind permitted — releasing only what it was ready to release, honouring the grief rather than trying to eliminate it.
By the third session, she reported something that moved me deeply: an improved feeling toward her living daughter. The connection between mother and surviving child — which had been strained by the overwhelming presence of the loss — was beginning to open again. The grief for the daughter she lost had been consuming the emotional space that her living daughter needed. As the trapped emotions released, room was made for both: the grief and the love, held simultaneously rather than one eclipsing the other.
By the sixth session, she reported feeling more like her old self. She was managing better at work. She had reconnected with colleagues she had once enjoyed. And she had done something that spoke more powerfully than any words: she had organized a memory wall in her home — photographs and artwork from her daughter, displayed with love and intention.
The memory wall was not a shrine to grief. It was a celebration of a life. It was a mother who had moved from being unable to function to actively, deliberately honouring what her daughter had given the world in her ten years. That transition — from paralysis to purposeful remembrance — is what becomes possible when the body is finally allowed to release what it has been holding.
The experience of grief as a physical phenomenon is well-documented in medical literature — and profoundly underappreciated in how we actually support grieving people.
The chest. The heart generates the largest electromagnetic field in the body. When grief arrives, the heart’s field contracts — measurably, physically. The tightness in the chest that grieving people describe is the felt experience of this contraction. The heart, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the loss, draws inward. The sensation of pressure, heaviness, and the feeling that something is sitting on the chest is the body’s electromagnetic reality expressing itself as physical experience.
The throat. Grief that has not been spoken — the words that were never said, the conversations that will never happen, the scream that lives just below the surface — settles in the throat. The difficulty swallowing, the sensation of a lump that never quite clears, the voice that has lost its resonance — these are the throat carrying what the mouth cannot release.
The immune system. Research published in journals including Psychosomatic Medicine and Brain, Behavior, and Immunity has documented that grief suppresses immune function — sometimes for months, sometimes for years. The increased susceptibility to illness that grieving people experience is physiological, measurable, and directly linked to the body’s stress response operating in a prolonged state of activation.
The digestive system. The gut — sometimes called the second brain — processes emotion the way it processes food. Grief often manifests as nausea, loss of appetite, bloating, or digestive disruption. The stomach meridian in Traditional Chinese Medicine is associated with the processing of worry and overthinking — and grief produces both in abundance.
The nervous system. Grief activates the sympathetic nervous system — the fight-or-flight response — and holds it there. The hypervigilance the mother described — always checking, always scanning, always assessing whether everything is okay — is the nervous system operating in a state of sustained alert. The loss taught the body that the worst can happen without warning. The body responds by never lowering its guard.
These are physical realities, measurable and documented. They are also the layer that most grief support — however compassionate and well-intentioned — fails to address directly. Grief counselling works with the mind and the emotions. The body sits in the room, carrying everything, and is rarely asked what it is holding.
The effects of Heart Wall removal are among the most consistently reported transformations in my practice. Clients describe:
Relationships deepening. Partners notice a difference — often without being told about the session. The quality of presence changes. The guardedness softens. The person who was always slightly behind a barrier is suddenly, unmistakably, here.
Emotional range returning. The ability to feel fully — joy, tenderness, grief, gratitude — expands. Emotions that had been muted by the wall’s filtration system arrive at their true intensity. For many clients, this is the first time they have felt the full spectrum of their own emotional life in years.
Physical changes. Chest tightness that had been attributed to stress eases. Breathing deepens. The posture opens. The body, no longer energetically bracing around the heart, reorganizes into a more expansive, more relaxed configuration.
A sense of lightness that is difficult to articulate. The most common words I hear after a Heart Wall session: lighter. As though something has been lifted from the centre of the chest that the person had stopped noticing because it had been there so long.
Career and creative breakthroughs. The heart is the seat of passion, purpose, and authentic self-expression. When the wall comes down, many clients find that their professional life shifts — new clarity about direction, new willingness to take risks, new creative energy that had been muted by the wall’s dampening effect.
Here is something I have observed consistently across years of working with grieving clients, and it is worth sitting with:
The intensity of grief is not always proportional to the loss alone. Often, a current loss activates older, unprocessed grief that has been dormant in the body — sometimes for decades, sometimes inherited across generations.
A woman who loses her mother at 50 may find that her grief feels disproportionate — overwhelming in a way that surprises even her. In session, we may discover that her body is grieving multiple losses simultaneously: the current loss, an unprocessed loss from childhood, and inherited grief from her grandmother who lost a child and never fully recovered.
The current loss opens the door. Everything behind the door comes forward at once.
This is why some people move through grief gradually and others feel swallowed by it. The difference is rarely about strength or resilience. It is about how much was already being held behind the door when the new loss arrived.
Understanding this does not diminish the grief. It does explain why it feels so enormous — and it points toward a path of healing that addresses every layer, including the ones that predate the current loss.
If you are carrying grief right now — fresh or old, for a person or for a version of your life that has ended — this practice offers your body something it may be desperately needing: acknowledgment.
Find a quiet place. Sit down. Place one hand on your chest and one hand on your stomach.
Close your eyes. Breathe slowly. And speak to your grief directly — aloud if you can, silently if that is all you have right now:
I know you are here.
I feel you in my body.
You are welcome to be present.
I honour what you are carrying — and I am here to carry it with you.
You are not asking the grief to leave. You are asking it to be witnessed. The body holds grief most tightly when it believes it is holding it alone. The moment you turn toward it — with acknowledgment rather than resistance, with presence rather than avoidance — something in the body softens. The grip loosens. The breath deepens.
If tears come, let them. Tears are the body’s most natural release mechanism for grief. They carry stress hormones out of the body through a biochemical process that is measurably different from the tears produced by irritation or reflex. Emotional tears are the body doing exactly what it was designed to do. They are healing in liquid form.
If tears do not come, that is equally welcome. Your body will release in its own way and in its own time. Your willingness to be present is enough.
The mother who built the memory wall understood something that most grief literature fails to articulate: healing does not mean forgetting. Healing means finding a way to hold the love and the loss in the same heart, at the same time, without one erasing the other.
The photographs on that wall are an act of integration. They say: my daughter was here. She mattered. Her artwork still deserves to be seen. And I am still here too — living, loving my surviving child, returning to work, re-entering the world she left me in.
That is what grief looks like when the body has been allowed to release what it was holding. The love remains. The weight transforms. And the person who was drowning in the loss discovers they can stand again — with the grief still present, carried differently, woven into the fabric of a life that is continuing rather than frozen in the moment of impact.
If you have been carrying grief — in your chest, in your throat, in the heaviness of a body that feels larger than it is — and the weight has persisted beyond what time and reflection can reach, your body may be holding something that the mind alone cannot release.
My article Why Lasting Emotional Change Begins with the Nervous System explores how the body’s deepest healing occurs at the level of the nervous system — and why grief, in particular, benefits from an approach that speaks directly to where it lives.
When you are ready — and only when you are ready — sessions are available in person in Bowmanville and Toronto, and worldwide via Zoom.
Your grief is not a problem to be solved. It is a testament to the depth of your love. And your body has been holding it faithfully, waiting for the moment when you are ready to carry it differently.
That moment is yours to choose. And whenever it arrives, you are welcome here.
Sheila Marina is the founder of Planet of Peace Energy Healing and a certified Emotion Code, Body Code, and Belief Code Practitioner with over three decades of experience helping people understand what they carry — first in Children’s Services and now in energy healing. She sees clients in person in Bowmanville and Toronto, and worldwide via Zoom. planetofpeace.org
